Melissa Mason

Creating beauty and order out of chaos. I like to capitalize on chance happenings with the paint, line, and gesture to create works that are spontaneous and stirring. I find it endlessly challenging and fulfilling to start with randomness and see where this takes me. The process leads to a dialogue between me and the inexplicable. My objective is to meld my innate need to create art coupled with evoking a visceral response in the viewer. The abx process offers the most natural way for me to articulate this.

These paintings are a record of that dialogue. Gestural mark-making, a random splash of paint are my catalyst and guide. Responding to the surface, exploring, and experimenting with the slow and thoughtful coupled with the impulsive and quick. Looking for balance between these two extremes. Calculated mark-making juxtaposed with the gestural application of color-intermingling, reacting, vibrating, creating work that is stimulating.

Melissa Mason is a contemporary abstract-expressionist painter best known for her equine art. Many of her paintings are non-representational, but there is a recurring equine motif in the work. The love and familiarity of horses is an enduring constant in her life, so it seems only natural for her to use it to explore the painting process.

The energy and freedom of the abstract-expressionists deeply influenced her and instilled a passion for the direction she choose in her art making – creating beauty and order out of chaos. The process involves pouring, splashing, squirting, brushing, dripping paint to get the paint on the canvas, letting the colors merge into beautifully formed shapes. Using those shapes, she then alternates between calculated drawing and gestural mark-making to complete the work.